Shark Week — senryu

imagine rows of teeth
shark misinformation
from white men

Isn’t it a snazzy title? I think so. If you wish, you can leave your comments and diatribes in the boxes at the end of the senryu. If you decide to read that far. I applaud those of you who will bully me with words that I haven’t heard since my high school years in the seventies. Yup, what is old is new. That has never changed. In fact, human nature has never changed.

As for the idiots and racists out there, good luck. My fellow Canadian, Scotty, is about to beam me up. He says he can get a few cases of Romulan ale for next weekend. It’ll be one hell of a big bang. Before I go, I’m wondering if I can have a volunteer to hold the Deadman switch I installed near my beer fridge.

Condos rising
Will terminal velocity
Be achieved?

What’s happening? Two plus isn’t four in this oblong dimension. Even the sky has an evil looking shade of purple. Even Google Maps knows that this isn’t Kansas.

It looks like I’m pinned to some white surface with muti-coloured polka dots. Is this Disney Land in another time and space continuum. That’s just great. Big Papi doesn’t exist along with the Green Monster.

I wonder what’s over there? Shit! It’s a division of Russian conscripts along side T-34 tanks. What the hell? No, I am in hell! We just blew through the Eastern Front towards Berlin. How do I explain to the kids that David Bowie is waiting for me at the Brandenburg Gate?

surfing the waves
on Tylenol III’s —
the hole in my gum

June 2022

My imagination is not letting me slow down. Even Vertigo wants to ruin the party. It’s as if the whole world is coming to me and not me going to it.

listening
hoping to look
into my being
too many men deciding
to take away my choice

Remembered

It felt good, the car windows were down and the sound was turned up high. Ted Nugent’s guitar chords and shrills exiting his studio Marshall amps brought me back to my late teens. Well, that was before he went gonzo and started writing the same over and over again after the Double Live Gonzo! Album.

Fifteen years later, my ten-year-old son and I would hear a clip from Cat Scratch Fever as we watched a AAA baseball player walked to the plate and dug his cleats in the batter’s box.

twenty more children
gunned down in a school**
politicians unwilling
to let their legacies
be known to the world

** Robb Elementary School on June 3, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas

WHY

she won’t look at me

I ask why

she won’t speak to me

again I ask why

she becomes fidgety

once more why

she runs away up the stairs

the fur ball left on the rug